Doctors Once Believed They Could Tell Whether Someone Was A Criminal By One Detail

This theory was originally developed by the Italian professor Cesare Lombroso in the early 1870s. Lombroso, now seen as the “father of criminology,” was a unique character in his own right.

Cesare came up with the idea while examining the dead body of a former thief and arsonist named Giuseppe Villella. He noticed that Villella had peculiar indentations on the back of his skull resembling that of an ape.

In his 1876 book Criminal Man, Lombroso described Villella’s skull as that of “an atavistic being who reproduces in his person the ferocious instincts of primitive humanity and the inferior animals,” essentially comparing Villella to a primal form of a human being with cognitive characteristics similar to an ape.

Lombroso believed that criminals often displayed identifying facial features such as humungous jaws and distinctly high cheekbones. These features, Lombroso argued, suggested a “love of orgies and the irresistible craving for evil for its own sake.”

These new ideas seemed revolutionary at the time and influenced a major change in the way criminologists analyzed crimes. Subscribing to this theory meant that humans were not born with free will. Instead, they were born with innate characteristics that made them a “born criminal”.

Lombroso’s new school of thought argued that one could identify a criminal from birth by analyzing features in the human skull. This theory has been debunked by modern scientists but, surprisingly, still plays a role in debates about nature versus nurture.

The pseudoscience behind Lombroso’s thinking was a combination of phrenology and physiognomy. Using these pseudosciences in conjunction, one could supposedly predict a person’s personality based on skull and facial features.

However, these predictive traits often relied on stereotypical racism such as “oblique eyelids, a Mongolian characteristic” and “the projection of the lower face and jaws (prognathism) found in negroes.”

Lombroso even mapped out facial characteristics for specific crimes! In his book Criminal Man, he stated, “In general, thieves are notable for their expressive faces and manual dexterity, small wandering eyes that are often oblique in form, thick and close eyebrows, distorted or squashed noses, thin beards and hair, and sloping foreheads.”

Prior to creating this new school of thought, Lombroso was a professor of psychiatry and director of an insane asylum. He specialized in nervous pathology and anthropology. Could these settings have given Lombroso such strange ideas?

It wasn’t until he began teaching forensic medicine at the University of Turin that he became an authority figure in the world of law enforcement and criminology. Here, Lombroso began specifying crime and criminals as their own individual area of study, earning him the misplaced moniker, “the father of modern criminology.”

Lombroso was also one of the first people to write about female crime. He would often provide insight into unusual and horrific criminal cases as an expert witness.

He once provided an expert testimonial for a case regarding the sexual assault and infection of a three-year-old girl. Following the case, Lombroso boasted that he singled out the perpetrator using physiognomy and traces of a syphilis outbreak.

After various successes as a criminologist and writer, Lombroso’s warped vision of forensic psychology spread throughout the West. It became known as Social Darwinism, which spread into the upper echelon of academic circles.

Leading American sociologist Charles A. Ellwood was a vehement subscriber to Lombroso’s theories. Ellwood would eventually become president of the American Sociological Society. He often cited Lombroso’s work and used his ideology as a frame of reference.

Lombroso was also a source of inspiration for others conducting criminal studies. But instead of achieving justice, the results of these experiments were often notably racist in nature.

Unfortunately, Francis Galton, a racist British anthropologist further warped these theories and created “eugenics” which helped propagate negative stereotypes about Jewish people, even influencing Nazi theories.

Most subscribers to Lombroso’s theories often failed completely to successfully profile criminals using his method. As the science of criminology improved, more prolific people began popping up and speaking out against physiognomy and phrenology, such as Russian novelist Leo Tolstoy.

Still, Lombroso’s idea of a “criminal type” was propagated in film and various scientific publications despite all the evidence against it. Fritz Lang, for example, was inspired by Lombroso when casting the movie M. Fortunately, as time passed, his theories were phased out and replaced by scientifically accurate research.

However, Lombroso would still proliferate into the modern era when his theories came into question with the advent of facial recognition technology. Raising eyebrows throughout the world, facial recognition made use of Lombroso’s “criminal type” features. Within the past few years, criminals may have twisted this technology to their own purposes.